Quality, Variety, and Parity: Prices in International Trade
type: CreativeWork
description: Prices determine allocation of resources in a market economy, yet their role in international trade theory is often underappreciated. In these three essays I provide novel empirical implementations of several theories relating to the prices of traded goods and show the implications for measuring the impact of quality, boosting welfare through increased variety, and explaining exchange rate fluctuations. Chapter 1 uses a variation on the well-known gravity model of trade to show that the observed correlation of export prices with distance is largely due to aggregating across shipping modes. Distance has no affect on free on board export prices once mode of transportation is controlled for; where goods are shipped by multiple modes, the observed distance premium conflates a selection effect with a direct effect. I also demonstrate that the standard Alchian-Allen analysis does not apply if goods are shipped by multiple modes of transportation, undermining an additional theoretical basis for predicting that average quality is increasing with distance in these industries. Thus, prior interpretations of the distance premium as indicating the existence of firm quality differentiation are shown to be largely unfounded. As a whole, the chapter highlights the important and little-studied role of transportation mode, and shows that it has a significant and overlooked impact on traded goods prices. Chapter 2, joint work with David Weinstein of Columbia University and Christian Broda of Duquesne Capital Management, evaluates the importance of countries worldwide gaining access to new varieties of traded goods in an semi-endogenous growth model framework. As producers gain access to new imported varieties, productivity rises and the cost of innovation falls, resulting in the creation of new varieties. These in turn can be exported, thus multiplying the impact on the world economy as a whole. We construct an exact price index that incorporates the effect of variety, using detailed…
abstract: Prices determine allocation of resources in a market economy, yet their role in international trade theory is often underappreciated. In these three essays I provide novel empirical implementations of several theories relating to the prices of traded goods and show the implications for measuring the impact of quality, boosting welfare through increased variety, and explaining exchange rate fluctuations. Chapter 1 uses a variation on the well-known gravity model of trade to show that the observed correlation of export prices with distance is largely due to aggregating across shipping modes. Distance has no affect on free on board export prices once mode of transportation is controlled for; where goods are shipped by multiple modes, the observed distance premium conflates a selection effect with a direct effect. I also demonstrate that the standard Alchian-Allen analysis does not apply if goods are shipped by multiple modes of transportation, undermining an additional theoretical basis for predicting that average quality is increasing with distance in these industries. Thus, prior interpretations of the distance premium as indicating the existence of firm quality differentiation are shown to be largely unfounded. As a whole, the chapter highlights the important and little-studied role of transportation mode, and shows that it has a significant and overlooked impact on traded goods prices. Chapter 2, joint work with David Weinstein of Columbia University and Christian Broda of Duquesne Capital Management, evaluates the importance of countries worldwide gaining access to new varieties of traded goods in an semi-endogenous growth model framework. As producers gain access to new imported varieties, productivity rises and the cost of innovation falls, resulting in the creation of new varieties. These in turn can be exported, thus multiplying the impact on the world economy as a whole. We construct an exact price index that incorporates the effect of variety, using detailed…
author: Greenfield, Joshua
language: English
keywords: Economics
date published: 2012
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:44:23Z
provider: Columbia University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Columbia University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7916/D8ST7WWH